On Frameworks ...

So I was reading zby's latest blog post on frameworks and libraries. On some level I agree with him that often times frameworks are basically just codified "convention", but I really don't see this as a bad thing, and here is why.

As I see it, the purpose of a library is to provide generic re-usable code that can be used in many different contexts. The purpose of a framework is to provide a set of guidelines/conventions/best-practices which a developer can then build upon, therefore avoiding the need to set those guidelines/dictate those conventions/determine those best practices themselves.

Some frameworks are more opinionated and complex (RoR, Catalyst, etc) and push/force you into their way of thinking, the benefit being that they also provide you with lots of building blocks that often times are zero-conf. While others (Dancer, Web::Simple, Mojolicious::Lite, etc) are more focused and purposefully simple, they leave many problems unsolved therefore allowing more freedom for the developer. Each of these approaches has merit and neither is truly superior in all contexts, which brings me to Plack and why I think this explosion of "frameworks" is a really good thing.

The ubiquity of Plack means that all these frameworks can be (fairly) easily used within the same application (or set of applications). It should (eventually) be very easy to have your Catalyst application running next to your Dancer application, running next to your WebNano application, all sharing the same session data, user information, etc. through Plack::Middleware components and mounted under a single Plack::App::URLMap and controlled easily using plackup.

Perl Oasis Slides

So I finally found some time this weekend to annotate my slides from OPW and get them uploaded to the interweb. The theme of the talk was two fold. First was that we all stand on top of the shoulders of those who came before us and that Open Source is a great context in which to do that, both when building on top of computer science concepts and when borrowing lessons learned from other language communities. The second half the talk was about my recent experiments using Plack (which is the Perl Web Server, in case you hadn't heard), Bread::Board, Path::Router and Moose, which I combined together as an experiment I call OX.

Plack - The Perl Web Server

Wow, in less then a week it seems that Plack has climbed to number seven in Google search results for Perl Web Server. It is only a matter of time before the hivemind that is Google realizes what we already know, that Plack is *the* Perl Web Server for the new millennium!

Perl Oasis 2010

So this weekend I went down to the Perl Oasis (a.k.a - Orlando Perl Workshop, or OPW for short), which is a small one day conference run by Chris Prather and his wife Jamie. I had missed it last year, but I heard so many good reviews of it I decided that this year I couldn't miss it, and I am really glad I didn't because I had a really great time.

There were lots of great people, great talks and great conversation. Some highlights include miyagawa's Plack talk (Plack really should be the top search result for "Perl Web Server"), Lucas Oman gave a really interesting talk about trying to implement Roles in PHP, the always entertaining Matt Trout gave a talk in the form of an epic poem and many more.

I find that I really enjoy the small and short conferences, they are usually on a weekend (less work juggling to do) and everything is a group activity enjoyed by all (much easier to coordinate activities when you don't have 300 attendees). This conference, along with the always fun Pittsburgh Perl Workshop are now both on my "can't miss" list.